Six on History: The American Revolution
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"NEW YORKERS are a famously restless, impatient sort of people, focused more on where they're going than where they've been. That's a real pity where the American Revolution is concerned, because the city played a key role in the resistance to King George III that led up to the Declaration of Independence. It's also the place where thousands of men died during the Revolutionary War that followed — not in combat, but in British prisons.
From 1775 to 1783, some 200,000 colonials took up arms against the crown. While the statistics are rough, it has been estimated that more than 6,800 died in battle. An additional 10,000 perished from wounds or disease. At least 18,200 became prisoners of war, most of whom were confined in New York City — along with perhaps as many as 1,500 civilian prisoners.
New York's little-known role as the jailhouse of the Revolution stemmed from a decision by the British to use the city as the nerve center of military operations in North America. An invasion in the summer of 1776 brushed aside General Washington's hastily arranged defenses and left the British with a bumper crop of American captives — and no place to put them.
The solution was to squeeze the men into an assortment of public and private buildings — including the new municipal almshouse and jail, a half-dozen churches, and two or three "sugar houses," or refineries. Broken-down warships and transports, stripped of masts and rigging, were soon pressed into service as well. Anchored in Wallabout Bay (now the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard), they became one of the most widely recognized and terrifying symbols of the British occupation.
These makeshift prisons, most of which remained in use throughout the Revolutionary War, were shockingly overcrowded — 20 men per cell in the city jail, 700 or more in one of the churches, as many as a thousand at a time in the steaming hold of a Wallabout hulk. The men never had enough to eat, and what they did have was barely edible. The water stank. Slop buckets ran over. Blankets and clothing were infested with lice. Typhus, smallpox and scurvy ran rampant.
Those who got out alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own shoes and clothes, of prison hulks whose decks were slippery with excrement, of wagons rumbling through cobblestone streets with corpses stacked like cordwood, of bodies hastily interred by the dozen on the beaches of Wallabout or in trenches on the outskirts of the city.
Communities around the country were directly touched by the catastrophe. Litchfield, Conn., sent 32 of its sons to war; 20 died in the prisons of New York and six more of malnutrition and disease on the way home. Fifty men from Danbury, Conn., were confined in one of the city's sugar houses; two survived. Of 130 prisoners from Northampton County in Pennsylvania only 40 made it out of the city. The final death toll will never be known, though a figure of 12,000 or more is consistent with the available evidence. During the Revolutionary War, in other words, more Americans lost their lives in the prisons and prison ships of New York than from any other cause — very nearly twice as many as those who died in combat. No one was surprised when the British provost marshal, William Cunningham, was reported to have claimed responsibility for killing more rebels in New York than the rest of His Majesty's forces combined.
The places where this happened vanished years ago, along with almost everything else in New York having to do with the Revolution. If the victims are remembered today, it is only thanks to the monuments in Trinity Churchyard and Fort Greene Park, plus a handful of little-read literary landmarks: Philip Freneau's epic poem "The British Prison Ship" (1781), for example, or the autobiographical "Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen's Captivity" (1779), one of the most popular American books before the Civil War.
The prisoners of New York left their mark somewhere else, too — in international law. Almost to the bitter end, the British took the position that captured American insurgents weren't soldiers but "rebels" and that defining them as prisoners of war amounted to de facto recognition of American independence. Americans responded that by not according prisoner-of-war status to the captives, the British had opened the door to, perhaps even encouraged, prison abuses.
An additional complication was that rules and standards governing the treatment of prisoners of war had yet to be spelled out definitively in international law. This began to change in 1785, just two years after the British evacuated Manhattan, when the United States and Prussia concluded a treaty that included the first guidelines for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. They mustn't be denied adequate rations and basic "comforts," it declared, nor "be confined in dungeons, prison ships, nor prisons, nor be put into irons, nor bound, nor otherwise restrained in the use of their limbs."
This groundbreaking agreement — a direct result of the recent American experience — was a historic first step toward the multinational conventions that now protect prisoners of war.
http://theoldstonehouse.org/battle-of-brooklyn/explore/
The Walking Guide to the Battle of Brooklyn is available for no charge on our website.
We do not have these materials available in paper format at this time.
In addition, we have an Battle of Brooklyn game and a walking tour narrated by John Turturro.
Best,
Maggie Weber
Director of Education
Old Stone House of Brooklyn
New York remained the seat of the British administration in the colonies for the remainder of the war. More than 1,000 American prisoners of war were held in New York: in a prison on the Common (present-day City Hall Park), in makeshift jails across the City, and on prison ships that were moored across the East River in Wallabout Bay (the present site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard).
November 25 was cold and clear, and eager patriots crowded the streets to await Washington’s triumphal return. The general’s party of about 800 cavalry and infantry moved south from Harlem across devastated farmland and villages toward the city. After entering the city proper along The Bowery at Chatham Square, Washington continued on and passed the burned-out skeleton of Trinity Church. But the condition of the city and its environs could not dim the joy the occupants felt at their deliverance.
Washington remained in the city for about ten days, attending celebratory banquets nearly every night and tending to army business during the day. On December 4, he met with his officers at Fraunces Tavern (the restored tavern stands at the corner of present-day Broad and Pearl Streets), where the combatants exchanged toasts and bid each other an emotional farewell. General Washington waited to leave the city for his home at Mt. Vernon until British commander Sir Guy Carleton and his last forces departed Staten Island by ship that afternoon. Washington appointed General Henry Knox as commander of southern New York, then walked to the Whitehall Slip and boarded a barge for the voyage across the harbor to New Jersey and his long farewell procession to Virginia. On the way, he stopped at Annapolis, Maryland, where the U. S. Congress was in session, to formally resign as commander-in-chief. Washington finally arrived at Mt. Vernon on Christmas Eve, 1783.
-written by Erik Peter Axelson
I just happened to see this on my TV's channel guide tonight and I'm in the midst of writing my African Americans in the Revolution lesson. Cool coincidence! Thanks Leigh
"In its first miniseries, “The Book of Negroes,” BET, in partnership with the Canadian public broadcaster CBC, takes a footnote from the Revolutionary War and turns it into engrossing drama.
Airing on three consecutive nights, beginning Monday at 8, the six-hour series — based on the award-winning book of the same name by Lawrence Hill, who co-wrote the teleplay with director Clement Virgo — tells the story of Aminata Diallo (Aunjanue Ellis, “The Help”), a woman stolen from her village in Africa and sold into slavery as a child.
Aminata — who comes to be known as Meena in South Carolina, where she lands after a harrowing trip across the ocean — is a fictional character, but her journey has roots in a true story.
Following the Revolutionary War, the British granted safe passage to Nova Scotia and freedom to 3,000 slaves who were loyal to the crown during the war. Only those named in “The Book of Negroes,” an actual document in the holdings of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., were aided in their flight from New York.
Beyond how refreshing it is to see a story like this told so singularly from a woman’s point of view, based on the first three hours, the miniseries isn’t lazy about simply plugging in tropes of the period, nor does it merely wallow in what were assuredly miserable experiences.
Much of the weight of the film is placed on Ellis, and like the fierce character she plays, the actress is more than up to the task. Whether lamenting the child stolen from her by an embittered slave master or sharing an easy laugh with Gooding’s character or a love scene with Chekura (Lyriq Bent), the husband she sees sporadically, Ellis displays a broad range. She embodies Aminata’s fire and resilience in the face of some of the most brutal acts of inhumanity without veering into superhuman territory. She knows that she is just one woman trying to survive, but it doesn’t make her any less of a hero. Shailyn Pierre-Dixon is equally compelling as the young Aminata, who shows the cleverness and determination later borne out by Ellis.
Historical tales like this can sometimes feel like homework — like “the right thing to do,” or some sort of Black History Month obligation — but the creative team at work here makes “The Book of Negroes” a tough lesson worth learning."
US History Speeches - Zinn Project
